 All right, we're going to bring on Jeremy Burton here. We're live at EMC World, the new CMO, not so new anymore. This is his second EMC World. We had him on last year. And he's a face melter. He's Mr. Face Melter. Jeremy, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. All right, Chad left his bobble head. That's good. Got the echo behind us in the pavilion. Re-gift. The champ bobble head. He meant to take it. He said, you got to go. I'll give it up. I'll go and get my own to the session. All right, we're on the air now with Jeremy Burton, the chief. That's good. So, Jeremy, welcome back to theCUBE. We had you on last year. Your first EMC World you had been here for just a couple of weeks. Didn't have time to... Thanks for inviting me back. Anytime. So we were at the mega launch. We had you on there as well. And you weren't kidding. You said that, you know, well, we're a $20 billion company. We got to start acting like one from a marketing standpoint. And you're doing that. Yeah, we got a lot to say. Yeah, I'll say. So, yeah, we saw some records breaking. We heard new records today. We were watching online. We saw that you set a new record with the most people in the hallway or something. Something like that. What's that all about? The most people in the hallway. What was that? It was 10,000 people in the hallway. It was a tweet that went out. Somebody tweeted it. EMC's breaking record breakers. 10,000 people in the hallway. Maybe we opened the keynote doors late and we probably had people back. I think it might have been some people tweeting about the new record that might not have been intentional. Yeah, no, it's good. There's a lot of people here this week. We need to get them out of the hallway and into the keynote room though. Well, there are a lot of people in there today. So you had a good year this year. You talked about marketing last year at EMC World, our first CUBE event. So we've actually feel kindred spirits with you because you were new to EMC. The CUBE was launched for the first time here one year later and three million views. We've kind of grown and watched you work and you were on the CUBE last year and said, yeah, we're going to up our game and we're going to have some fun. We're going to be a consumerization, like a consumer company. Why should they have all the fun? I think you've done some cool things. You had some big flashy events, the mega launch. You had a motorcycle guy jumping over systems. You had a big tape ball, record, mini Cooper. I mean, good job. I mean, I think very impressive year for you. Yeah, we've had a fun year. The key thing to all of this though is the message. We want to make the message simple. We want to make it stick and we want to make it memorable. And one of the ways I think you make the message memorable is the mini Cooper, the record breakers, the, you know, Bubba Blackwell who's here. But, you know, I hope what folks walk away with is, hey, that was a record breaking launch, right? That was really the goal of the mega launch. And I think it was mission accomplished. And, you know, EMC World, we're more kind of up here, strategy, cloud meets big data, but I defy anyone to ignore what the message is this week or try and avoid it, you just, you can't. You said you're into messaging and I think you did a good job. We've talked to Joe Tucci, all the senior executives over the year. They're all impressed with you. You've done a good job. And the whole management team at EMC is really open-minded and they're really thinking differently. They're thinking bigger. They're really thinking about market share. They're thinking about the transformation of the brand. Pat Gelsinger last night spent an hour with us here in theCUBE and he talked about things as he had that 20 mile stare in the marketplace and he was thinking, hey, you know, hey, big data, Hadoop, it's not about what's going on now, it's about what we're going to do. And that's about a transformation of the brand. So how are you going to be able to keep up with that? Are you going to keep running hard? Is there a strategy? How are you thinking about that? Share with us your views. Yes, and maybe I've maybe a slightly different view because I don't view a, you know, kind of marketing, keeping up with the strategy. I view the strategy, keeping up with the marketing. Good answer. But no, I mean, look, I think what we tried to do is eliminate a lot of the noise. You know, tell folks, look, we're about cloud and then once you've built this cloud platform, what are you going to do with it? Big data comes next. And I think it's probably fair to say that we are, you are seeing probably the tip of the iceberg as to what we can do with big data. And so I feel like we've got to build out that story for quite some time. And, you know, we tend to forget this. I mean, certainly in marketing and marketing people in general, every marketing has got a mild case of ADD, right, some of them have a major case. And, yeah, we tend to get bored of messages too quickly. And our job here is to sustain. So I kind of feel like to keep up, we've just got to be belligerent about reinforcing the message and repeating the message until we're convinced that everybody we need to reach, we actually have reached. And so this cloud versus big data or meets big data, kind of get used to it because you're going to see a lot more in the future. Well, the line, it's not my line, but it's a good one is big data that gives the cloud something to do. And so it is. And, you know, you talk about marketing leading the message. You could have had EMC World Cloud meets big data with just Green Plum and just Icelon, but it's got to make your job easier when there's actually some more meat in the bone. You guys jumped in two feet arms, you know, cloud of blazing with the Hadoop announcement. So that's got to help your credibility. Yeah, Hadoop was a good call. I think I saw some press coverage earlier today around, hey, how could you have a theme of big data and not talk about Hadoop? I mean, yeah, spot on. I mean, you can't. Hadoop is fundamental to the analysis of unstructured data. And I think with the Green Plum acquisition, we got our feet wet in the world of data or data management. Hadoop we felt was just a very, very necessary next step. And, you know, the statistics that are to be believed, that's going to be the thick end of the wedge in terms of data analysis over the next decade. And I think EMC can bring a lot to the party there. So how do you, you talked about reaching more people, your brand is changing, your marketing is changing, and how do you scale that? How do you go about and do that? Yeah, I think we've got to acknowledge that there are new roles developing inside the business, not just IT, but inside the business. And last year we really talked about cloud architects. This year we are really zeroing in on data scientists. People who are not really maybe experts in the database, but are experts in understanding the semantics of the data. And that for me is an emerging role, but as information becomes much more kind of fundamental and important to the business, these people become invaluable. And so to me one of the ways we can scale our message is we need an advocate inside every big organization. The advocate for EMC is probably not the DBA. It's probably going to be one of these newer roles, the cloud architect, the data scientist, and I've got a couple of others at my sleeve as well. We'll see that in our business. We use data science and data scientists. There are a version of data scientists to basically gather the data so we can reach more people. Do you see, I mean, are you hiring data scientists in your marketing team? Well, so we don't have them in the marketing team, but we have a number of data scientists in our data computing division. And these guys are very, very interesting because I don't know whether you've met over the years, I've met a lot of engineers, and it's interesting how often people who are good at programming are also good at piano, right? So it's kind of like capitalism and communism and at Xtreme, they're very close. And I think the same is true of kind of math and art at Xtreme, they're very, very close. And so these data scientists, they tend to want to be very, very good at the analysis, but also the visualization of the data. And so I think every major organization is going to end up with multiple data scientists. And the companies where data is their business, the LinkedIn, they've already got hundreds of these guys on staff. Yeah, I mean, a big part of, I mean, obviously marketing has to serve sales and drive new business, but a big part of the whole data scientists push, in my opinion, I wonder if you can comment on this, is that you guys have to, if you're going to go into the Hadoop world, that's a whole, that's a brand new market for you guys. It's the Wild West. And you've got to attract these types of data scientists. And a lot of that's marketing. Marketing the company, marketing the brand. Yeah, I mean, open source is a very different way of going about it. And you've got to establish credibility in the community. And the way you do that is you contribute. You embrace the community and you contribute. And I think certainly with the Green Plum team, that's a path that they've trodden in the past. And I think the marketing team can learn a lot from the way the start of the Green Plum team have gone about it. The data scientists I feel are somewhat related. I feel we've got to get into the academic institutions. I think this is something that is almost part of curriculum. I think it is something that the academia will embrace big time. And I believe in 10 or 15 years time, I mean, I just wonder how many kind of pure engineering degrees you're going to have. As infrastructure becomes less important and data becomes more important, the engineering of the data, I think is what the forward-looking colleges are going to be after. And that is a great way to scale our message. And it's a new marketing tactic, but I think it's one that we've got to exploit. How about some of the tactical things that you're doing? Obviously, Greg Goss was on your wingman, creative director. And you've got another old reacquaintance onboard, Jonathan, corporate marketing head you just hired. So you got that brain trust together, Jeremy. So you guys are playing around with some new channels, obviously working with theCUBE, with us allowing us to do our independent thing. You have EMC-TV going on really strong, very complimentary of what we're doing. You got viral videos, you're in the social channels. Got the iPad application. iPad application. So you're not afraid to experiment. What have you found that's working? And again, we talked about this last year, Silicon Valley. Pat Gelsinger talked about innovation and failures. Okay. What have you found that's kind of worked, not worked? And what have you doubled down on? I think, and this may sound almost like a cliche, but the social media thing has really worked for us. The mega-launch, it's really the first time that I've really done a kind of full-on social media campaign and the results were spectacular. Because the physical event, if you like, you do the physical event and you think that that's the big thing and it really isn't. The big thing is the online world. And we were able to kind of tease people through social media. We were then able to bring that social media noise and buzz to the actual online event and drive over 50,000 views on the day of the highlight reel. That for me, that is working and we don't do enough of it. It's early. It is early. The Mini Cooper video, putting 26 people in a Mini Cooper sounds like a dumb idea and maybe it was, but man. It's great. Let's get a huge play on YouTube. We ran that. Well, we ran that with the, we did a FlashCube during the Big Data Conference that GigaOm ran out of our studio and we ran footage from the mega-launch as bio breaks for us and the audience stated with it, five minute highlights of Joe Tucci. Because we had B-roll basically. Bubba Blackwell. Patel. We had probably 200,000 views of the FlashCube. It was amazing. We got over 200,000 views. I don't want to say gimmicky, but your kind of Flash became great B-roll for us. But your branding's all over it. And the audience was consuming it. So it was like, I guess it's a five minute commercial. Yeah, well this is where the risk comes in, right? I mean, I do encourage the team to take risks and we're going to get it wrong sometime on the video and we're going to get it wrong in the world of social media and the thing is you've got to not crucify the team, because it's about getting it right nine times, not getting it wrong once. And I really feel like I'm starting to see from the marketing team the kind of creativity and innovation because they've got the license to make a mistake, not because I always, I mean, I want them to do great stuff, but if they make a mistake, that's okay. Is that, I mean, that's got to be a culture shift for a lot of the traditional EMC. We talked to Pat last night about EMC, East Coast, West Coast Company, it's really a blend now, but so are you seeing that on the East Coast version as well, or is this more the cowboys out in your land? You're in John. Yeah, I mean, you know, cowboys out in our land, come on. I think that's true. Every major tech company's got a headquarters, but I would argue no major tech company is really headquartered in one single place. Everything is global. And really, if I look at the guys that we're competing against, it's the biggest of the big, and so we've got to make ourselves heard. And so if you like that risk taken, it's competitive advantage, because I think we do have a management team that allows me to take risk. And as long as that's the case, then I think we probably have a leg up on some of our competitive competition. One of the things that I've been impressed with is that you guys are coordinating, so I guess maybe the budget may be a little bit bigger. I'm not sure what the numbers are, because you guys don't tell us what the numbers are, but it seems you're spending some money. You said last year- We spend the most with Wikibon and Silicon Angle, I can tell you that. I don't know where that's going. But no, seriously though, but you said last year you're going to spend, but you got your messaging. And in the world of social media you're talking about, these are new access to your customers. Greg Gottz was talking to me about the vision around, hey, your customers are normal people too, they're watching movies, they're probably doing stuff on Netflix, and their kids are on YouTube, they're going to grow up to be getting stuff, news on Facebook and YouTube and all that. So you, as a competitive advantage, can reach your customers in a new way. And yeah, the interesting thing about it, and it's kind of, I think, difficult for marketers to accept this, because the world of social media, it is absolutely permission-based, unless you can get a customer to fan you, or friend you, or acknowledge that you are a person that they want to communicate with, then you don't get the right to talk. And so it's a very different model to email. As much as most emails should be permission-based, our inboxes will testify that it really isn't at times, but the world of social media is, and you've got to deliver, first and foremost, high-quality content before you get permission. And that to me is kind of key, why folks like Greg and Jonathan and a lot of the creative folks in the team become important because they can generate the content that is interesting, that will drive people to want to talk to EMC. And then once you get them, you got to, the consumer has to know that he or she trusts you, right? Because, you know, we talk about security a lot, but the other side of the coin is privacy, right? So when you're getting this permission-based marketing, you're talking about big data, there's incentives to give up some of your private information, but I got to know that it can be protected. Yeah, and I think that the better the content, the more willing people are to, willing to give up personal information and details. If I say, look, you can have a free Symetrix Array, if you give me all of your personal details- You'd be lining up. And the names of your kids, they'll be like, sure. You know? But, you know, and this is what I actually like about the world of social media is it forces the marketeers to be content rich. If you're content rich, you'll get the right to market. And if you're not, you know what I mean, you're out the game. What's interesting is is that, you know, you guys have your message of cloud and big data, and, you know, the pressure will be on you from a marketing standpoint to use big data. As you're mentioning, you have access to your customers who are connected, who are measurable now. They're not this black box, you know, voodoo, 50% of the time, you don't know who you're talking to. You could actually, they talk back at you now, and that's measurable. So this lifestyle angle you have with your programming and the brand resonates. I think that is a very cool thing, even the bubble black well and the media cupid and the things you're doing. It's lifestyle. Yeah, you're putting a human face on AMC. It's real. I mean, it's not trying to be super, it's not over trying to be cool. It's just being lifestyle. And I think that is the social media formula you tie in events. You tie in face-to-face communications. And, well, I mean, the social media, right? I mean, I look at this as, you know, it's challenging the establishment, you know, you know, bloggers hate press releases, right? Because it comes from the establishment. Bloggers probably hate corporate websites because it is the polished voice of the corporation. And the thing is, is you can ignore that kind of at your peril because it is what it is. And so you got to play the game the way the world now is. And that means been, you know, less uptight about certain things and taking a few more risks. And I think if you do that, then- Well, we've had conversations about our business. We've met with you a couple of times and talked in depth. And, you know, we love, you get what we do and we love that. And, but I want to get your opinion on the media because one of the things that we're studying, Dave and I, is the big data role in our business. And looking at the existing franchise, like the New York Times, like the Wall Street Journal, like the trade magazines, like the print magazines and even TV. I mean, you've seen that world, you've played in that world. The world is changing like the cloud, big data business. People are online, online's the new TV. We're seeing YouTube today at Google I.O., talking about amplifying their video operations. What is that going to do for the ad business? I mean, it's still a huge number. Yeah, these media companies. The ad business is going to Google and Facebook and, you know, the new online media, if you like. Why? Because these guys have got better information, better targeting. I mean, you think about the old world of targeting ads. I mean, there was no data. You kind of guessed you had this shotgun and you'd go blasting things and hope you hit. The new guys have got data that can target. And what I think is that a lot of these guys who today are maybe working for, maybe traditional media, I actually think that corporations like EMC could benefit a lot from some of the writing talent and capability that they have. Because if you think back to what I said a second ago, content is king. There is a lot of great writing talent in these traditional publications. And I would like a lot of them to tell the EMC story and deliver the EMC story in a rich way to people so that they can understand it. And I think you're starting to see that. I mean, I've seen many of the old journalists that I used to brief back in the day. They work at salesforce.com or they're at IBM and they're commentating on what's going on inside Salesforce or inside IBM or they're writing company blogs. Why? Because they're journalists, right? They're out there and they're good and they can tell a story. Well, our business model is a little bit different. We can actually afford to hire journalists the way we do our programming. But I just noticed a CNET reporter just went to Google so that the notion of curation and original content is a big deal and there's that balance of that authenticity and independent and vendor-specific. But it's blurring and social media is great for us because we can do our thing as an independent organic content but collaborating with you guys and it's been so successful. Yeah, I think for traditional media, look, most of the print advertising, it ain't coming back, right? With very few exceptions but I think maybe the iPad or tablet devices represents some kind of oasis in the middle of the desert for a lot of these guys. But even the iPad advertising model has not been figured out yet. I mean, we've done a bunch of work with the FT and with the Wall Street Journal and it's getting there but I think we're still probably a couple of years away from like very good high quality targeted advertising in the iPad which I think most of the traditional print advertising will move to that medium but most of the rest targeted search advertising that ain't coming back. But the content model on the iPad is very new. We spend tons of time on this and in my opinion is that the data is the key. I think the big data message is clear and the things that we're doing with Trend Connect, our service that we're doing really is about a user experience and I think at the end of the day whoever can crack the code on organic programming and get a user base, the advertisers will figure it out how to vector into that. So I like what we're doing, Dave, I think that's compelling and we don't have that baggage of like an institutional media company. So the challenge I see for the print guys is they love the tablet because it's a subscription. They can say we got someone downloaded and it's the new newspaper. The interruption, the interuptive ad, I don't, I'm not bullish on that. That's just my opinion. So Jeremy, how do you top this? I mean, you have to. We haven't got going yet. Right? I mean, I believe him when he says that. Ronald Reagan's line, you ain't saying nothing yet. This show I think can just, can only get bigger. And what is interesting, I know a lot of folks don't think about it this way, but it's worth thinking about it this way. If you add up VMworld, RSA conference and EMC world, it's up there with Oracle Open World. I mean, Open World probably gets about 50,000 people. We had 17,000 at VMworld. We had about another 18 at RSA. You've got about 10 at EMC world. So I think, you know, for EMC as a whole, these conferences become a key way to get a message to, not just the install base, but you know, people who don't really know what EMC stands for. And we also, you know, through RSA and through VMworld, getting to the bite of the cherry. Yeah, I know it's a great, great events. Open, great vibe at those events. I mean, and this event is changing. There's still the root, the technology roots, but I definitely feel more of a business flair. VMworld, very open. We did Open World. We had theCUBE at Open World last year. We called it Oracle Close World. I mean, it was just a not-same vibe. We snuck in. We basically snuck in. I would love to do something pretty radical around big data. I mean, we were holding a data scientist summit here this week, and we had the registration up for three weeks. Four or 500 people registered in three weeks. So the interest level is there, and I think that interest level is only going to get bigger. The data science thing is a good marketing. Why wouldn't we have an industry meeting around big data, share practices? Our three biggest days were Hadoop World, and two days at Strata. Well over a million views on those three days. Well over. I mean, yes. And there's a great organic community, and you've got the developers, because you've got the science side of it, and you've got tech. There's real innovation there, and there's real science involved. So this is not about just slapping a cloud up and some Ruby on Rails coding app. It's real deal. I mean, this is scale. It's math. It's real tech. Yeah, and I'd love to do it as not a vendor fest, right? I think, again, content is king. If you want to get the right kind of people there, lead with the content, lead with the discussion, and I'm a big believer, the more that we can help share best practices around big data, particularly analytics, all the boats rise, right? If people get better at analyzing data, everybody becomes smarter, and I'd love to get some kind of forum together along those lines. So last year you said a lot of things on theCUBE, and they worked out. You hit your milestones. You're on your evaluation, check, check, check. On our notes, we went back at the clips, which will run a few years later. But anyway, they say the stock price was going to be up there. No, no, we said it was $100 billion market cap. I think we called that. Well, we called that by 2014, 2015. We also said that, at the beginning of 2011, we said that the core value of EMC dropped. We did that analysis. We said it's crazy. Right after that, the stock has done very nicely. And the core value, I don't know if it was my blog. And Pat Gelsing, we had clips from Pat. He said, it was very clear everyone had objectives you hit them. So this year, what is your plans for this year on the roadmap and what are the things you want to nail down? Yeah, I think we got to solidify the big data story. It is a new world with things like Hadoop. We've got to be a player in that community. Number one, number two, there's a pretty interesting application story developing. VMware's got a big chunk of that. Palmer, it's talked about that this morning. But there's some kind of gems inside EMC that I think we've got to polish and dust down. And I really feel, if Cloud Architect was last year and Data Scientist was this year, we think there's a pretty good pitch around the new developer. And I would love, I mean, it's been a big passion of mine. Which developer? The new developer. And I'll leave it at that for now, but it's been a big passion of mine because. DevOps. There's some interesting stuff going on there. I built Oracle's development community back starting back in 99. And it's a passion of mine. And we've got a couple of nuggets in the EMC portfolio that I don't think we've really done ourselves justice with. Put it that way. Yeah, good. That's interesting. It has a ton of leverage there. Yeah. Well, over time you're going to see EMC. Infrastructure is certainly a big part of our business, but data and applications will become an increasing part of our business over time. Well, there's the belief that as open source software commoditizes traditional software, data becomes the new source of competitive advantage in the business. We believe that. It looks like you guys buy it to that, at least to a certain extent. So yeah, this is a very exciting time. Jeremy, thank you for your time on theCUBE. We really appreciate your support. You've been great to work with. Your team is visionary. And they're executing, they're experimenting and succeeding. So we really appreciate that. And congratulations on a great event. Thanks and hopefully see you guys back here. Same time, same place. All right, good deal. All right, thanks. Jeremy Burton, the chief marketing officer. Building out a great organization in EMC.